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Marvel Champions is a 1-4 player superhero game. Each player takes on the role of a Marvel hero to battle it out against one of three villains. Play as Captain Marvel, Spiderman, She-Hulk, Black Panther, or Iron Man and face off against Rhino, Klaw, or Ultron. Each Hero is represented by a deck, consisting of basic cards, Hero-specific cards, and aspect cards. Each Villain is represented by a deck of cards, comprising villain-specific cards, basic villain cards, and a modular encounter set.
Marvel Champions is a Living Card Game (LCG). As such, the publisher, Fantasy Flight Games, is expanding the game with new Hero & Villain packs all the time. If you're inclined, check out a full review & final thoughts of the core game here. However, for today's review, we'll be focusing on the latest big box campaign expansion The Galaxy’s Most Wanted.
Challenge Accepted - Galaxy's Most Wanted
Fans of the game have been calling for tougher, more challenging villains for a while now. For the record, I am not one of these people. One of the main appeals of the game for me is that it is fun and challenging. The difficulty has been ramped up to an 11 in this expansion. Along with two new heroes, Rocket Raccoon and Groot, there are five new villains (well, four really but you fight the same villain twice in two different scenarios).
A Raccoon With A Gun
Starting off with the heroes, both are fantastic to play. Rocket Raccoon comes with a preconstructed aggression deck and focuses on weapons/tech. These cards come in to play with counters on them and can be exhausted to deal additional damage. There are tech cards that allow you to add more counters onto the weapons to keep them firing for longer. With Rocket having a base attack of one, thwart of two, and defence of one the additional attack power from these weapons is essential for Rocket to hit hard and hit fast. There are some great Hero cards for Rocket Racoon and, once again, he feels thematic to play.
There are also some great new aspect cards in the deck like the Hand Cannon. It is a restricted weapon but is an aggression aspect card and not a Rocket card. Rocket has a two resource card called Salvage which allows you to add a tech upgrade card to the top of your deck from your discard when spent. Combining this with Rockets “overkill to draw card” ability or “discard a tech card to draw cards” ability means you can get the all-important tech cards back into play quickly. Fun, entertaining, and potential for some impressive combos.
I AM GROOT
Groot comes with a pre-con protection deck and is all about the growth tokens. These, along with various aspect cards, can be spent to increase Groot’s thwart, deal damage, prevent damage, increase attack, and add tough status cards to friendly characters. Keeping Groot topped up with Growth counters is very important and he has an interesting ebb and flow of gaining growth counters, having powerful turns, and then building backup again. There are some very interesting protection cards such as Fighting Fit and Hard to Ignore which increase the choices for the protection aspect going forward. As with Rocket, a very thematic Hero to play and has a different feel.
Build Your Own
However, as interesting as these characters are, I think the pre-con decks are ill-suited for the campaign. I quickly built my own Rocket aggression and Groot justice deck after only a few games. I don’t claim to be a master at this game and typically play on standard difficulty but I was having a very hard time making progress in the campaign.
Galaxy's Most Wanted - Campaign Challenge
This leads us nicely onto the campaign and what a step up in difficulty this is. If you are after a challenge then you will find it here. The villains themselves are, again, interesting and different. Drang has his charge up ability which charges every turn then fires. The Collector 1 has an ability that, as the name suggests, collects cards that are put into the discard pile from play. If a certain number of cards are placed in the collection you lose. The Collector 2 can’t actually be defeated and to win this part of the campaign you need to remove threats from various stages of the main scheme. This adds another way to win the game other than simply killing the enemy which makes you think more about the decks you are building.
Nebula has technique attachments that activate at various times during the villain phase. Nebula also has her ship which gains counters each turn and the number of evasion counters matter for various phases of the main scheme. Finally, it is Ronan who is just crazy tough. The board state at the start of the game is daunting to say the least. Main schemes, environments that give you additional encounter cards, and attachments that give an additional +1 attack and +1 scheme. I have still not figured out how to deal with Ronan yet.
There are some cool campaign elements like gaining credits to purchase new cards for your deck and the Milano ship which can be used in various ways to generate resources or remove threats.
Tune My Decks
The villains are very tough in Galaxy's Most Wanted. They require a finely tuned deck specific to the villain you are facing to take them down. If this is what you like then Galaxy's Most Wanted will be right up your alley. However, if you are more of a casual player that likes to build a deck (or even use pre-con decks) then this campaign might prove frustrating. I feel that the difficulty arc could have been managed a bit better in this expansion. Having said that, taking the campaign aside there are two new Heroes who are fun and entertaining to play and five new villains to add to my ever-growing Marvel Champions challenge.
